A woman and boy died
in my division last night. The woman left a little child, eighteen months old,
which is inconsolable. The father, a soldier, wishes to take the child away,
but was not permitted to do so or to see it, for fear of contagion. It is to be
kept to see if the child has the disease. [It did not, and had no scar from
vaccination, such queer freaks the disease takes.]
The boy, an
Alabamian, told me yesterday he was getting better. He had been sent here with
measles, recovered from those, but the small pox did not break out. He died
easy, and said he was "going to Heaven." I write his people today,
via Fortress Monroe. His name was G. B. Allen, of Rockford, Cousa Co., Alabama.
One man died yesterday, to whose people I have written to-day. Another died
to-day. The mortality here is great. Said one patient to me: "People die
mighty easy here."
I asked in what way,
he meant.
"Oh," he
replied, "they'll be mighty peart-like, one minute, an' the next you know,
they're dead!"
This is true, and I
find so many who were sent here with measles, recover from those, and die of
small pox. Sixty cases of measles were sent to this hospital
in one month, as I learn from the lips of the surgeon in
charge himself, Dr. F. These are sent by the several physicians of Nashville.
The fact itself speaks volumes, but to stay here and see its effects day after
day in the poor victims of such ignorance, impress one with a sense of the
importance by the medical faculty of distinguishing between the two diseases.
SOURCE: Elvira J.
Powers, Hospital Pencillings: Being a Diary While in Jefferson General
Hospital, Jeffersonville, Ind., and Others at Nashville, Tennessee, as Matron
and Visitor, pp. 42-3
